Skip to main content

Travel



Whenever I think of travel, Tennyson’s Ulysses will spring to my mind. “Much have I seen and know – cities of men / And manners, climates, councils, governments,” says Ulysses. That’s just what travel does: make us see and know cities, manners, climates, etc.

I loved travels. My years in Delhi were filled with much travel. I accompanied students on the annual educational tours and treks and during holidays my wife and I visited quite a few places like Darjeelinng, Gangtok and Shimla. I enjoyed both kinds of travels: with students and with my wife.

Travel broadens our perspectives by opening our eyes and souls to new realities. Though I was very much aware of the Gorkhaland struggle in Darjeeling even before I visited the place, the visit filled me with sympathy for the Gorkhas. I listened to their views and watched their hardships. I wondered why political leaders failed to understand their people’s woes and find relevant solutions. Why should the genuine aspirations of thousands of people go ignored for decades particularly in a democracy?

The answer to that question will provide a clue to why I stopped travelling in the last few years. In the current political situation in India, travelling is quite unsafe. Far from broadening your mind and ennobling your soul, your travel may get you eliminated physically from the face of the earth.

Mob lynching has become a national pastime in India. In the recent incident of lynching which happened in Mewat (Rajasthan), the people who killed a man for taking home the milch cows he had bought boasted that they had the support of their MLA. Brutal murders are sponsored by various governments in India today.

You can be killed for taking your cow home. You can be killed if you are seen with a child; you will be labelled as a child-lifter. You can be killed for walking with your wife or daughter in a park; there is the ubiquitous moral police lying in ambush behind the bushes in the park.

India’s Prime Minister is travelling all the time though the travels do not seem to broaden his mind or ennoble his soul a bit. Right now he is in Rwanda with a gift of 200 cows. Cows can travel safely in India and may even go abroad with no lesser a personality than the Prime Minister himself.

When will India be once again a country where people will be free to travel without fear?

Let me wind up with some nostalgia from my travels in strange lands when there was nothing to be afraid of.
 
Can i dare to pose like that today?
 
Can I dare to make friends with a child today?
PS. Written for in(di)spire Edition 231: #Travel


Comments

  1. dee NambiarJuly 25, 2018 at 5:22 AM

    So true political climates have been hampering free and fearless travel in several countries. As long as we have heads of state who just will not condemn hate crimes be it against religions and races, we'll see no light at the end of the tunnel. :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 25, 2018 at 5:59 AM

      There's a clear political motive behind the assaults and lynching. We live in very pathetic times when rogues are heroes and heroes are projected as villains.

      Delete
  2. Adventrue valleyMarch 13, 2020 at 1:17 PM

    Amazing Information and post for reading.Book on adventurevalley.in for high adventure trekking in Manali. Enjoy breathtaking views of peaks and valleys while trekking in Himachal Pradesh

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more